The geologist Eldridge Morse and the science fiction writer
Kim Stanley Robinson and I were having lunch one
time in Davis, California.
These are people who are always thinking in large frames.
Kim Stanley was the author of the Mars Trilogy or Red Mars,
Blue Mars and Green Mars, a great science fiction trilogy,
if you like science fiction.
And he is taken by people who are actually
in the sciences as the most scientifically
astute and correct of all the science fiction writers.
still you can't read it.
But Eldridge was telling us about--
he said well there are some little bits of matter on planet
Earth that were created before the Earth was
created that they're older than our galaxy possibly.
And I said Eldridge how in the heck could that happen.
Now how are you going to do that?
And he said, well I'll tell you why.
And this is the poem for it, just a very short poem.
A rain of black rocks coming out of space
onto deep blue ice in Antarctica.
9,000 feet high, scattered for miles.
Crunched inside of them yet older matter
from times before our very sun That's
called get older manners.
He says that's true.
But before our sun was created, we
got some little bits of matter from before that time.
What are you going to do with it?
Put it on your alter.
These are a little section of short, a very short poems
called Glacier Ghosts.
Flowers in the night sky.
I thought forest fires burning to the North.
Yellow Nomex jacket thrown in the cab, hard hat, boots, a gun
to the truck up the road scrambling.
It came out on a flat stretch with a view.
Shimmering blue green streamers and a red glow down the sky.
Stop storms on the sun.
Solar winds going by.
That's the night of the red Aurora
Borealis seen as far South as northern California April 2001.
I actually thought the woods were on fire everywhere
to the North.
I said but it's too wet but I still couldn't believe it.